Excerpt

Madness in Morocco: The Road to Ishtar

It was a high-stakes gamble, sending three of Hollywood’s biggest, most uncompromising talents—Warren Beatty, Elaine May, and Dustin Hoffman—to make a movie in the middle of the Sahara. As $51 million evaporated and relationships crumbled, a legendary disaster was born: the 1987 comedy Ishtar. In an excerpt from his new biography of Beatty, the author chronicles a cascade of dysfunction, from the triangle of May, Beatty, and leading lady Isabelle Adjani to the studio politics that sealed Ishtar’s doom. Plus: Check back in for Little Gold Men’s film disaster time line.

Hoffman and Beatty on location for Ishtar, 1985. “I’d do it again,” says Hoffman. “I just wish it had been worked out better.” “We probably shouldn’t have gone to Morocco,” allows Beatty. By Keith Hamshere/Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

Reds, an epic account of the Russian Revolution, was Warren Beatty’s masterpiece, a personal triumph that he starred in, co-wrote, produced, and directed. For that he was acknowledged by his peers in the motion-picture Academy with four individual Oscar nominations and a win as best director. But it was an open secret that he couldn’t have made Reds without Elaine May, who did major reconstructive surgery on the script—uncredited—and was a powerful voice in postproduction, helping to shape the finished film. Nobody knew this better than Beatty, and after Reds was released, in December 1981, he began looking for a project to do with her. “He owed her,” says writer and friend Peter Feibleman. It was a debt that would prove costly for both Beatty and May, if not financially then in its manifold repercussions, which included the undermining of a studio regime and arguably the crippling of May’s career in film.

May, who declined to comment for this piece, was best known as one half of Nichols and May, the celebrated stand-up comedy team that had performed An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May on Broadway from October 8, 1960, to July 1, 1961. Widely regarded as a comic genius, she also had a reputation for extreme eccentricity. She had had some success as a director, turning The Heartbreak Kid (1972), based on a Neil Simon screenplay, into a modest hit, although her follow-up, Mikey and Nicky (1976), from her own script, was a disaster. She had a co-writing credit on Beatty’s 1978 hit, Heaven Can Wait, and, a year after Reds, Dustin Hoffman would credit her with saving Tootsie. In the words of production designer Paul Sylbert, who had worked with her on Mikey and Nicky, “Ideas flew off her like lint.”

Beatty, who was famous for having slept with almost every woman in the known universe, had first met May in 1964, but there was nothing sexual between them. May was attractive—thin, dark-haired, wide-eyed—but, according to Feibleman, “Elaine was too savvy to be one of those girls on Warren’s list. The minute sex got into it, she would have been dead in the water. She became the person he talked to. She was like a guy.”

Beatty—who has discussed Ishtar with me sporadically over several years—felt that she had never had a good producer, one who protected her, allowing her talent to flourish. Whatever the film they would make together turned out to be, he would produce, giving her that protection; he would also star, lending her his box-office clout, which at the time was unmatched.

One night, Beatty was having dinner in New York with May and attorney Bert Fields, who represented both of them. “Elaine was interested in the Middle East,” Beatty recalls. She was also enamored of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road movies, which had been big in the 1940s, and wanted to riff on them. That night, she began making up scenes. As the idea took shape, Beatty and a yet-to-be-named co-star would play two schlemiels, a hopelessly mediocre pair of sub–Simon and Garfunkel singer-songwriters chasing stardom a decade and a half too late, staggering from one tacky venue to another but unwilling to let go of their dream. Unable to make a cent in the U.S., the two get a gig in Morocco, where they stumble into the crossfire between left-wing guerrillas and the C.I.A. May had the bright idea of scrambling the casting, which struck her as funny: the co-star—maybe Dustin Hoffman—would play the Crosby role, the suave ladies’ man, while Beatty would essay Hope’s, the klutz.

Beatty took the story idea to his old friend Guy McElwaine, then chairman of Columbia Pictures, which had been purchased by Coca-Cola in 1982. According to someone who worked on the film, the star’s high opinion of May was evident in the marching orders he gave his attorney: “Bert, anything she wants. Period. That’s my negotiating position.” The project was submitted as a Beatty-May collaboration, with the possibility of Hoffman’s coming aboard.

With two recent hits behind him, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, as well as a succès d’estime, Reds, Beatty was at the height of his career, and Hoffman too was riding the crest of a wave of hits—All the President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie. It would be an attractive package for any studio. But McElwaine was wary. May’s reputation preceded her, as did Beatty’s and Hoffman’s, perfectionists all, for whom nothing was ever good enough—a trio of finicky filmmakers who loved to argue. And with the exception of Stanley Kubrick, May was the only director who shot as much film as Beatty. “Columbia’s nightmare was having a trio of Hollywood’s most uncompromising talents working on the same project somewhere in the Sahara Desert,” says a source close to the film. But, the source adds, “Columbia’s other nightmare was passing on a project that included Warren, Dustin, and Elaine, then having it go to Fox or Universal, and watching it be a huge hit.” Said McElwaine in a contemporaneous interview, “I spent a lot of time with Elaine, talking about this project. And she assured me she was not going to misbehave.” But this was like asking Amy Winehouse to go cold turkey. Still, on the basis of Beatty’s persuasiveness and May’s assurances, McElwaine committed, and May set to writing the script.

The Satyr in the Creamery

Beatty and Hoffman were an odd couple, occupying parallel universes. Where Beatty, raised Baptist, was tall and powerfully built, Hoffman was short and Jewish with, he was fond of saying, “acne so bad my face looked like a rifle range.” But they had things in common besides arriving in New York around the same time, in the late 50s, early 60s—Beatty from Virginia and Hoffman from L.A., where he had been raised. They were the same age (born in 1937), both played the piano (at one point Hoffman had wanted to be a singer), and each had dropped out of college after a year to pursue acting.

Hoffman first met Beatty in a shoe store, or maybe it was an ice-cream parlor, in Beverly Hills in 1967, shortly after The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde had made them supernovas in the celebrity firmament. Beatty was with then girlfriend Julie Christie. “I was sort of self-conscious about being a new movie star, and he looked very comfortable with the role,” Hoffman remembers. “He was wearing sunglasses, sitting on a bench. He made some kind of sexual double entendre, something about 69 flavors, and I just kind of looked at him. He said, ‘You don’t like that flavor, huh?’”

Although Hoffman couldn’t have known it, this was vintage Beatty, catching the contradiction in the man. By exploiting his boyishness, Beatty would make a career playing naïfs and innocents, all variations on small-town Bud in 1961’s Splendor in the Grass, his first movie. For this version of himself, ice cream was his best prop; he loved to eat it, and wherever ice cream could be found, so could he, licking a cone like Archie Andrews. But the double entendre hinted at another Beatty, suggested a coarseness that qualified the innocence, that both complemented and contradicted it. The two together made the whole package: the satyr in the creamery, cavorting among the dairymaids.

Beatty gave Hoffman May’s now finished script. “When I read it, I had misgivings about it,” Hoffman recalls. “I turned it down.” Beatty persisted, requested a meeting. In those days, Hoffman rarely made a creative decision without consulting his guru, playwright Murray Schisgal. The two men got together with May and Beatty. Both Hoffman and Schisgal still felt that the action plot, when the film shifts from New York to Morocco—the intrigue, the chases, the explosions—overwhelmed the smaller, more delicate story at the heart of the drama. “We felt that the movie should not leave New York,” Hoffman says. “That whole Hope and Crosby thing in Morocco was [a distraction]. Just stay with these guys who think they’re Simon and Garfunkel, and play that out. Warren and Elaine disagreed. But he deferred, deferred, deferred to her.”

Hoffman could see that May was proprietary and inflexible, foibles with which he was all too familiar. But Beatty took Hoffman aside and told him, “You saw those movies that Elaine did. I’m going to be there, and I’m going to make sure that she has the room to do her best work.” Hoffman continues, “He was saying, ‘Don’t worry about the script. Go with her talent. Go with us.’ He wasn’t wrong. You do go with the talent, and you do go with the synergy of what’s going to take place. What he didn’t predict—what no one predicted—was that he and Elaine were going to clash.”

Beatty, Hoffman, and recalcitrant “blind” camel. Producers scoured Moroccan bazaars for weeks to find a rare blue-eyed camel that would read as sightless on film. By Keith Hamshere/Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

Like Beatty, Hoffman was in general far more inclined to say “no” than “yes.” But that meant there were long stretches where he didn’t work, at least in movies. He thought, God, I can’t wait another three years before I make a movie. I’m getting too old. Either I say “no,” like I always do, or I decide to work and just be a color on her palette. As he and Schisgal were walking out, Schisgal turned to his friend and asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m probably going to take it.”

“Why?”

“Partly as a favor to Elaine, and also because Warren is so persuasive.”

Hoffman explains, “My resistance was so fundamental, in terms of keeping it in New York, that once they disagreed with that it was: Let them have their vision and let’s hope for the best. I’m just going where they want to take this.”

Beatty and Hoffman got about $5.5 million each for acting in the picture. Beatty got an additional $500,000 for producing, and May $1 million for her original script, plus directing. This added up to a nice piece of change, $12.5 million just for the principals, before a single frame of film went through the gate. (It was rumored that Beatty and Hoffman would each also get 5 percent of the box office starting with the first dollar.)

There was nothing unusual about the size of Beatty’s and Hoffman’s salaries, approximately equivalent to what Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio would get in today’s dollars. As McElwaine noted, at that point Beatty had never stumbled with a picture that he produced. “I was always aware of the fact that our salaries were hefty salaries,” says Hoffman. “I knew that could not help us—it could only hurt us. I remember saying, ‘Why take all that money?’” The three principals offered to defer their salaries, but the studio declined. (According to Fields, Columbia had a deal with HBO that covered a chunk of the budget.) What was unusual was putting two such highly paid actors in the same picture. And what was even more unusual, although Beatty denies it, was that each of the three principals was assured input into the final cut. McElwaine was blithely sailing his ship into a perfect storm.

The Road to Morocco

The Ishtar cast and crew were quickly filled out. Isabelle Adjani—the French-Algerian actress who had shone in François Truffaut’s 1975 The Story of Adele H. and was Beatty’s romantic flavor of the moment—would play the love interest, an update of the exotic Dorothy Lamour roles in the old Road pictures, although May’s script would have her disguised as a boy for most of the movie. Charles Grodin, a friend of May’s whom she had used to good effect in The Heartbreak Kid, was cast as a C.I.A. agent. Composer Paul Williams (“We’ve Only Just Begun,” “Rainy Days and Mondays”) was hired to write the not-ready-for-prime-time songs that Beatty and Hoffman would perform—deliberately bad, but not so bad that the audience would walk out.

For reasons of both budget and control, Columbia would have preferred the film to be shot somewhere within spitting distance of L.A., but it turned out that the studio’s parent company, Coca-Cola, had frozen financial assets in Morocco which had to be spent there, so the studio acquiesced to the filmmakers’ desire to decamp for the real Sahara. The plan was to shoot in Morocco for 10 weeks and then shift to New York. But at the time Ishtar began production, in October 1985, Morocco was not the most hospitable location for a major Hollywood film, especially one that featured a rich Jewish movie star. On October 1, Israeli warplanes had bombed the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization close to nearby Tunis. A week later, most likely in reprisal, four hijackers from the Palestine Liberation Front seized a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, and dumped passenger Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish American, overboard into the warm waters of the Mediterranean after shooting him dead as he sat in his wheelchair. To make matters worse, the Moroccan government was involved in a protracted struggle with guerrillas of the Polisario Front. The air was alive with frightening rumors. “We heard there were armed Palestinians headed our way,” recalls Sylbert, who was on board as the production designer. “There we were with Dustin, who sort of stuck out.” According to one source, “We had been out looking for locations when this extremely agitated Moroccan general came rushing up. ‘You have to wait for the minesweeper!’ he shouted. ‘There are mines all around here. You could lose a leg.’ We had been walking for three days. Everyone went white.”

Shooting in Morocco presented other problems as well. Reports a second source, “The Moroccans were extremely cooperative. But they were not set up to do a movie. It’s a very poor country. When we had a casting call for 200 extras, 8,000 people showed up. When we would say, ‘We’ve got to have 30 camels at seven o’clock tomorrow morning,’ they would say, ‘No problem. You can have 300.’ Then comes seven o’clock the next morning and there are no camels.”

Ah, the camels. One saga instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend: the hunt for the blind camel, called for in May’s script. Actually, the hunt was for a blue-eyed camel that would register blind on film. (Or blue-eyed camels—the producers figured they needed four, in case one broke a leg.) The first stop was the camel market in Marrakech, where the animal trainer, Corky Randall, and his assistant found just the right camel, for about $700. But being shrewd traders, they didn’t want to buy the first camel they stumbled on—they thought they could do better. So they told the camel trader, “Thanks a lot, we’ll get back to you.” But, as it turned out, blue-eyed camels were a rarity. None of the subsequent camels Randall came across measured up to the first. As was reported at the time in New York magazine, “The humps would be too large or too small. The facial hair would be beige or brown. It was always something.” Finally, the trainers gave up and went back to the first dealership to buy the perfect camel. “Remember us? We’d like to buy that camel of yours that we looked at the other day.” “Sorry,” the dealer replied. “We ate it.”

In the Sahara Desert, May was very much a fish out of water. She was allergic to the sun, swathed her face in gauzy white veils and huge sunglasses that made her look like a storm trooper from Star Wars. She wore big hats, protected herself with parasols, and took shelter under tents whenever possible. She suffered from toothaches throughout much of the shoot, but refused to use a Moroccan dentist on principle, as if only a New York dentist would do.

From the first, dunes were a problem. Sylbert was the designated dune guy. He says, “I listened to nothing but talk about dunes.” Even before the production had settled on Morocco for its location work, he had looked at dunes in Southern California and Idaho. None would meet May’s standards. “It was hopeless,” he recalls. “Nobody was satisfied.”

Once the production set foot in Morocco, Sylbert embarked on a tour of the country looking for the perfect dunes. He finally found some that fit the bill—he thought—near Laayoune. “There were these great coastal deserts,” he recalls. “Perfect. But with all the talk of dunes, Elaine’s idea of the desert was Brighton Beach. Whenever she was faced with a decision and she didn’t know what to do, she would stall, and I could see that she was stalling now. There’s a story about Edith Head or Diana Vreeland working with a famous actress and saying to the actress, ‘You’d look wonderful in yellow,’ and the actress said, ‘I hate yellow,’ whereupon Head or Vreeland replied, ‘Who said anything about yellow?’ On the drive back from seeing the fabulous dunes, Elaine suddenly said, ‘Dunes? Who said anything about dunes? I want flat!’”

Sylbert says he took 11 bulldozers off a construction site about 25 minutes from Laayoune and leveled a square mile of sand. But, according to film editor Phillip Schopper, a friend of May’s who worked on Reds and Ishtar, “none of that happened. The land was hard-packed, so we trucked in a lot of sand. But we didn’t take any dunes down. Sylbert will say nothing but horrible things about her.” Several other crew members, including associate editor Billy Scharf, agree that there was no bulldozing. “Elaine was too smart to do stupid things like that,” he says. “Sylbert is a genius, but he hated her.”

But others, if not exactly confirming the bulldozer story, do concur with Sylbert’s assessment of May’s mercurial behavior. Says associate producer Nigel Wooll, “She would change her mind about anything and everything: setups, locations, costumes. If you’d ask her, ‘Black or white?’ she’d say, ‘Yes!’ Nothing suited Elaine. Ishtar was a really difficult film. They went crazy in Morocco.” May’s indecision may in part have been strategic. As one crew member observed, “Directors control in different ways, and she controlled by creating mass confusion.”

If it was Beatty’s purpose to enable May by surrounding her with the best of the best, he succeeded all too well. For example, Beatty had hired the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who had shot Reds as well as Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris, and The Conformist. According to Julian Schlossberg, May’s producer and business manager, she got along famously with Storaro, but Sylbert claims she “completely neutralized” the cinematographer. According to Wooll, “One problem was that she had no idea where to put the camera. But if Storaro said, ‘Why don’t you put the camera here?’ she wouldn’t listen.” Storaro—who instantly located the finest Italian restaurant in Morocco and managed to be the best-dressed human being in the Sahara Desert, wearing gossamer-thin cashmere sweaters when everyone else wore T-shirts and jeans—constantly complained about his director. According to Hoffman, he would say, “Elaine, I love her, but she drive me crazy.” Storaro enjoyed telling the story of how he had outsmarted her. He would arrive at the location having to match a shot from the day before, meaning the light would have to be the same. He’d say something like “Elaine, I’m going to put the camera over here today, and they come over that dune.”

“Vittorio, no, I’d like the camera on the opposite side, 180 degrees, over there. And they’ll come over that dune.”

“Elaine, is no going to match. We get the shot off, the sun, it will be coming from front of them, when yesterday was behind them. The dune, she looks like the same dune.”

“No, no, Vittorio, that was the dune they were coming over.” She waved her hand vaguely at the horizon.

“But nobody know the dune, they know the sun.” This would go on for days. Eventually, he thought, “Today I put the camera where I no want the camera. She say, ‘No.’ I move the camera opposite, where I want it.” Which is what he did.

May relied on Schopper, her friend and editor, in her fights with Storaro. “The notion of her eccentricity is greatly exaggerated,” Schopper says. “Eccentricity is in the eye of the beholder.” From May’s point of view, Storaro was designing shots with an eye to their composition, whereas she was composing for comic effect.

Hoffman recalls that Beatty often took Storaro’s side. “She probably felt ganged up on by the two of them,” he says. “Elaine became suspicious, and less collaborative. She wanted to make her movie. Paralysis descended on the set. When the tension started, I didn’t want to be in there at all. I just wanted to do my shit and go back to the hotel.” Neither Beatty nor May would give Hoffman any direction. May, who probably didn’t know what to tell him, said nothing. Beatty, who probably did know what to tell him but didn’t want to usurp May’s prerogatives, also said nothing. Hoffman continues, “I would have to ask, ‘Elaine, what do you want me to say?’ I’d go to Warren, ‘What do you want me to say?’ Warren and Elaine—you couldn’t get closer than those two—suddenly it was like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But no shouting. It was worse than shouting. They stopped talking to each other. Ice. There were times there when I was the go-between. Me, of all people, who had my own reputation, was going back and forth, saying, ‘C’mon, guys!’” (Schlossberg, who was on the set, remembers it differently: “It’s absolutely untrue that Elaine and Warren stopped speaking.”)

“The Longest Double Date in History”

As if things on the set weren’t bad enough, Isabelle Adjani wasn’t happy, either. The actress didn’t seem to get along with May, appearing to feel that May didn’t like her—an impression that others shared. Indeed, with little else to do except watch the director dither, people speculated about reasons for May’s enmity. Says Sylbert, “You know why [the production of] Mikey and Nicky went on for as long as it did? Because Elaine was the meat in a sandwich between two men she was crazy about, Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. She went on the longest double date in history. And you had the same situation on Ishtar. But there was no other woman in Mikey and Nicky. When there was another woman, she paid for it. Elaine buried Isabelle, because her whole thing was what she got by being between these two guys. It was a sex fantasy.”

According to Hoffman, the relationship between Beatty and Adjani wasn’t much better. “There wasn’t a lot of speaking there either,” he says. “I think that it was painful, God knows, for Warren. Because on the one hand he’s having trouble with one of his closest friends and colleagues, and on the other hand he’s got a girlfriend who’s [unhappy]. He was holed up in his suite, kind of in seclusion. Then he’d say, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ Lisa [Hoffman’s wife] and I would go to dinner with them at the Mamounia, in Marrakech, and there wasn’t two sentences between them—they would be looking in opposite directions. It was awful.”

The editors were so flummoxed by May that they grasped at anything that might give them a clue to her intentions. Usually, when a director watches dailies with an editor, he or she will whisper something approximating, “I like take three and take five,” while the editor takes notes. May didn’t do that. She took notes herself and wandered away with her pad instead of sharing what she’d written. There was no Staples in Laayoune; pads and pencils were in short supply, and it wasn’t long before the production started to run out. Thinking he was being clever, Scharf, the associate editor, tied May’s pencil to her clipboard, and the clipboard to the chair she was sitting on. At the end of one screening, she ran off after Storaro, clipboard in hand, yelling, “Vittorio, Vittorio,” dragging the chair with her. Even she noticed the impediment to her forward motion. She cried, “Why is this chair coming after me?”

On set, May shot take after take. It is said, doubtless in jest, that a snake charmer walked into the production office in Marrakech one day with a limp cobra draped over his arm. He burst into tears, claiming the cobra had endured so many takes it had had a heart attack and died. He wanted $2,500, and settled for $150. But the inevitable budget overruns were no laughing matter, especially to Columbia. Says Sylbert, “The money was just going and going and going.” At one point, Sylbert claims, May leaned against him and confided, “I’m making so many mistakes.”

The simmering tensions between the film’s principals came to a boil when it was time for May to shoot the movie’s climactic battle sequences. “Warren put himself in a tough spot, where he couldn’t do much with Elaine once things started to go down the sewer,” Sylbert recalls. “Then he had a moral choice to make. The day he made it was the day the biggest showdown came, when she would not shoot the battle scene. She knew nothing about action sequences. A battle scene for this woman who had done everything by improvisation? You can’t improvise a battle scene. I got a call from Warren, and he said, ‘Listen, all she wants to do is pickups on the stuff she’s already done.’ She wanted to go backwards. She knew he couldn’t let her do that. She was afraid. He told me, ‘Do me a favor—do some sketches [of the battle scenes] so we can show her how to do it.’ I made the sketches, brought them to a meeting in Warren’s trailer. We tried to get her started. She was fighting us. She was in the same state she was in with ‘Who said anything about dunes?’ This was ‘Who said anything about battle scenes?’ I said, ‘Look, you can put the camera here, put the camera there, you can bring them in from here’—she wouldn’t move. She fucked up everybody, neutralized everybody with her fears. She was like a black hole: swallowed everything, nothing escaped. Except her fears.

Hoffman, Adjani, and Beatty on a break. From the Everett Collection.

“You could see Warren was getting very angry and frustrated, but he never blew up,” Sylbert continues. “Finally he challenged her: ‘Something’s got to be done,’ blah, blah … She said, ‘You want it done? You shoot it!’ He was stunned. At that moment, he had to make a decision. He knew he had no move on the chessboard. If he stepped in then, he would have had to take over the movie.” But it would have embarrassed Beatty to step in for May, when the whole point of Ishtar, as far as he was concerned, was to empower her. As Sylbert puts it, “His instincts saved him: ‘I’m the one who brought her into this, so I’m the one who has to live with it. I’ve got to take the responsibility.’ He couldn’t become one of those producers who fired the director. Although he was right on the edge. But it was too late. It wouldn’t have saved the movie anyway.” Says cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, who was then Storaro’s Steadicam operator, “In any other circumstances she would have been fired.” But Beatty knew he had no choice but to let her alone. The battle scenes were scaled back, and May got through them.

Beatty had put together an extraordinary cast and crew for Reds, a vast undertaking—far bigger than even the now bloated Ishtar. He was very shrewd about talent, and about people with talent, particularly May, whom he knew as well as he knew anyone. How could he have misjudged her so badly? How could he have made, in effect, a $40 million, $50 million blunder? “Warren did not have an easy time on Reds,” says Feibleman. “Elaine was always there when he needed her. She so directed his hand in terms of story line and structure—she corrected him constantly—he would have had to be Solomon to guess that she would not know how to do it herself. [But on Ishtar] Warren and Elaine were locked into a kind of dance of death.” Adds Sylbert, “They gave her the Sistine Chapel. It was just much too big for her.”

Searching for Perfection

Despite his growing difficulties with May, Beatty never complained about her—except once. He and Hoffman were in the desert, along with 150-odd extras. He took his co-star aside and started venting. “Warren was going off about how painful it was to make this movie with Elaine,” Hoffman recalls. “He said, ‘I was going to give this gift to Elaine, and it turned out to be the opposite. I tried this and I tried that … ’ He was so passionate, but in the middle of it—it’s like he had eyes in the back of his head, because there was some girl walking by, maybe 50 yards away, in a djellaba. He turned and froze, just watched her. I mean, this was while he was producing and everything was going in the toilet. But he couldn’t help it.”

Finally, Beatty turned back to Hoffman and asked, “Where was I?”

“Warren, let me ask you something,” Hoffman said. “Here everything is going wrong on this movie that you planned out to be a perfect experience for Elaine, and here’s a girl that you can’t even see a quarter of her face because of the djellaba—what is that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me ask you something else. Theoretically, is there any woman on the planet that you would not make love to? If you had the chance?”

“That’s an interesting question: Is there any woman on the planet”—Beatty paused and looked up at the sky—“that I wouldn’t make love to? Any woman at all?”

Hoffman continues: “He repeated the question, because he took it very seriously. This problem with the production was now on the back burner, and it was like he was on Charlie Rose.”

“Yes, any woman,” said Hoffman.

“That I wouldn’t … ?” said Beatty. “No, there isn’t.”

“Theoretically, you would make love to any and every woman?”

In character as singing duo Rogers and Clarke. By Keith Hamshere/Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

“Yes.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

Hoffman: “He was thinking. He was searching for the right words. ‘Because … you never know.’ I thought that was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard a man say, because he was talking about spirits uniting. He was not talking about the cover of the book. And then it was ‘Where was I? I just don’t know what to do about Elaine … ’ But this took precedence.” Hoffman was right. Beatty was searching for perfection. It was the same passion that fueled his prodigious appetite for takes: “because … you never know.”

“Elaine Can’t Direct”

The cast and crew arrived back in New York just before Christmas, on December 23, 1985, having completed their allotted 10 weeks in Morocco but with many scenes still to be shot. Fay Vincent, later the commissioner of Major League Baseball, was then executive vice president of Coca-Cola and president and C.E.O. of Columbia Pictures. He recalled in an interview with journalist Scott Eyman that at that point Beatty told him, “We have a big problem. Actually, you have a big problem. Elaine can’t direct.”

“You’re the producer. Fire her.”

“I can’t. I’m a liberal Democrat, a progressive on women’s issues. I can’t fire her. But she can’t direct at all.”

“Well, then, I’ll fire her.”

“Then Dustin and I will walk off the picture.” According to Vincent, Beatty then proposed that they shoot dual versions of every scene—his and May’s. When they got into the editing room, where Beatty could exercise more control, he would simply consign May’s footage to the cutting-room floor. Vincent replied, “So we’re paying for two movies and only getting one?”

Sets for the unfinished sequences in Morocco as well as for the New York scenes were built at Kaufman Astoria Studios, in Queens. After a one-month break, production resumed in the third week of January, in Astoria and on location in the city. Out of the blazing sun and in the safety of darkness—especially the interiors of Manhattan clubs, where Beatty and Hoffman would perform Paul Williams’s cannily bad songs—May seemed energized, while the others were just drained. “By the time they got to New York, they just wanted it done,” says G. Mac Brown, the city-based unit production manager.

Although Beatty was preternaturally patient with May, he was all too familiar with her buttons, and sometimes he’d play head games with her. For example, in a scene where he’s asleep he needed May to cue him to open his eyes. He asked, “So what are you going to say?” She replied, “I’ll say, ‘Wake up.’” Instead, on the first take, she said “Awake!” Beatty knew perfectly well that that was his cue, but he refused to open his eyes. She said it again: “Awake!”

“You said you were going to say, ‘Wake up.’ We just had that conversation. Thirty seconds ago. And now you say ‘Awake’?” And so it went.

In April, after it finally wrapped, Ishtar claimed another casualty. If Beatty couldn’t bring himself to fire May, Vincent had few compunctions about pushing McElwaine out and replacing him with David Puttnam, the producer of Oscar-winning films such as Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields, who had endeared himself to Coca-Cola with his highly publicized crusade against the financial sins of the industry. As People magazine put it, Puttnam “oozed integrity.” But placing him at the head of a studio was like making Jerry Falwell the mayor of San Francisco.

He also had a checkered history with both Beatty—during a nasty Oscar race between Chariots of Fire and Reds he had told the press Beatty ought to be “spanked” for overspending on Reds—and Hoffman, with whom he had had a bitter falling-out over the 1979 film Agatha. Puttnam, the film’s producer, had called Hoffman a “worrisome American pest” and left the project after accusing the actor, who originally had had only a small role, of taking over the film and re-writing the script. Hoffman recalls, “When he went to Columbia, I looked at the front page of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times, and he was quoted as saying, ‘Dustin Hoffman is the most malevolent person I’ve ever worked with.’ Being the intellectual that I am, I had to look the word up.”

Comic high jinks, or so it seemed at the time. By Keith Hamshere/Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

Needless to say, neither of *Ishtar’*s two stars welcomed Puttnam’s arrival. In an attempt to head off controversy, the studio announced that, because of his prior history with the pair, Puttnam would recuse himself from personal involvement with their film. But that just made things worse, giving the impression that the studio head was taking a hands-off approach to Ishtar because it was radioactive, which just angered the stars more. Says Beatty, “This guy came in and said, ‘Look how much this movie is costing. These people are fools.’ If your own studio is trying to prove that his predecessor wasted money, it’s like walking into a buzz saw when you come to release it.”

“God, Is This Going to Be Frosty”

The editing began in earnest in the spring of 1986, in New York, with Steve Rotter (The Right Stuff), Bill Reynolds (The Godfather), and Richie Cirincione (Reds) wading through 108 hours of film, or four and a half days’ worth, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (A typical comedy might shoot something more in the neighborhood of 30 hours of film.)

The strains among the principals, already battered and bruised, continued into postproduction. According to a source, May, who was supposed to direct the actors when they looped (re-recorded) their dialogue, occasionally didn’t show up at all, leaving Beatty or Rotter to do the honors, especially with Adjani. Says the source, “If your director’s not there at a looping session, that’s horrible.” Whatever the reason, May’s absence at Adjani’s session was interpreted as a snub. Rotter, who refused to comment for this piece, reportedly muttered, “God, is this going to be frosty.” Since Adjani was disguised as a boy for much of the film, she was always being told to drop the register of her voice to make the ruse convincing, especially in a scene where she’s being tackled. Recalls the same source, Beatty said, “Lower your voice, like you’re being squeezed,” and proceeded to demonstrate by grabbing her. With utter contempt, she yelled, “I’ve been squeezed enough on this film already!” Adds Schopper, “They weren’t talking to each other. Isabelle was tired of Warren and his shenanigans. You felt her attitude was: I’m not putting up with this stuff anymore.”

Initially, Beatty allotted six and a half months for postproduction on Ishtar, aiming for a release date of Thanksgiving, possibly Christmas, 1986, but it would be 10 months before the film was locked. As long as McElwaine had been in place, the star had done his best to satisfy Columbia. But with Puttnam in charge, things were different. Explained Fields, “Warren’s feeling was that, since we no longer have the pressure to do it for Guy, let’s let her [May] do it the way she wants.” In the view of at least one Columbia executive, letting May take her time may have had the added advantage for Beatty of running up postproduction costs and interest on the loans the studio had undertaken to finance the picture, putting the new chairman in the hole.

Puttnam had believed that, once production ended, the bleeding would stop. “I was staggered by the postproduction costs that kept coming in,” he said, according to Andrew Yule’s book about Columbia and Puttnam, Fast Fade. Beatty reportedly told one Columbia executive, “Who gives a shit what Puttnam thinks? I certainly don’t. Just tell the asshole to keep paying the bills.”

Ishtar missed its Christmas release date. For the most part, Beatty and Hoffman stayed away from the editing room, letting May have her way with the footage. Well into the new year, they seemed unaware that the new release date, late spring 1987, was now bearing down on them. Somewhat belatedly the two stars appeared to realize that if they wished to exercise their say over the final cut they needed to get started on their own versions of the film, since May was well advanced with hers. According to a contemporaneous account in The New York Times, there were three separate teams of editors working around the clock, one for each of the three principals, and all being paid double time. Hoffman worked with his editor during the day, Beatty at night. Every morning, Hoffman would ask, “What did Warren do to my scene last night?” Every night, Beatty would say, “Let me see what Dustin did to my scene today.” According to Fields, “I don’t think they did separate cuts. That may have happened to individual scenes.” In any event, the differences between the cuts weren’t dramatic; they essentially boiled down to the distribution of close-ups, like, was the camera on Dustin’s hands playing the piano or on Warren’s face as he grabs the mike?

The atmosphere in the editing room was tense. “Warren and Elaine had a huge fight,” recalls actress Joyce Hyser, who began seeing Beatty around that time. “He felt that she screwed him.” Finally, according to one source, Fields was invited into the cutting room to mediate among his three final-cut clients in an all-night meeting. “Bert Fields had final cut,” says the source. “It’s a fact!” Along with the editors, the principals gathered in front of the kem editing console. Fields chaired the proceedings, switching back and forth among cuts. According to one person in the room, an assistant would put up some version, usually May’s, and then Fields would ask, “Anybody have a problem with this scene? We’ll run it until somebody has a problem.” Eventually, one of the three players would say something like “That’s not the version I want to show.” Fields would reply, “Let’s see yours.” One of the assistants took notes that read like “We’ll use Dustin’s version of this scene, we’ll use Warren’s version of that scene … “

According to Beatty, this account is “bullshit.” He says he doesn’t remember Fields ever being in the editing room. But Fields himself confirms that “we were all in the editing room. I was trying to get everybody’s opinions, but Elaine was the final arbiter.”

Says Schopper, “Warren kept trying to do things mostly with Isabelle’s scenes, because she was his girlfriend. The relationship had become a bad one, and Warren was trying to be as generous to her as could be. He was overcompensating. They fought and they fought, Warren and Elaine, things being thrown up to Bert—it was like a Bake-Off—and Bert going with Warren.”

But the principals knew they had to make the marathon session with Fields work, no matter how tense the relationships had been on the set. And from their point of view, they were succeeding. According to Schopper, “Elaine finally said, ‘You have to lose some of the battles to maintain the whole,’ but she won her way for the most part.” When the sun came up, Fields said something like “We have a movie!” But the editors were scandalized. Rotter exploded, yelling, “We don’t have anything. All we have is a lot of paper. How do you know any of this stuff works?” Says one person who has knowledge of what went on in the room, “It was sad. We were just dumbfounded that these intelligent people could have ever let this occur. This was not the way you make movies. Each change affects everything else. The movie has to be screened in its totality several times.” And some of the notes were not exactly honored in practice. According to the source, when Beatty asked what one of the notes said, claiming he couldn’t read the handwriting, he was told, “It says, ‘Use Dustin’s close-up version.’” But he insisted, “I can’t read that! I don’t see that,” meaning he didn’t want to see it, so that he was free to do what he wanted.

Warrensgate

Missing a release date is like raising a red flag on which is inscribed in bold letters film in trouble. And indeed, after Ishtar failed to make its Christmas 1986 opening, the press, already alerted to budget overruns, smelled blood in the water. The picture was too expensive, it was going to be a bomb, etc., etc. Time magazine wondered whether Beatty could “turn movie production into a form of seduction, in which large, supposedly rational corporations are encouraged to spend bloated sums of money for unlikely enterprises.” The L.A. Times labeled Ishtar “the most expensive comedy ever put on screen,” and Hollywood insiders started referring to it as “Warrensgate,” an allusion to the legendary flop Heaven’s Gate. Recalls Joyce Hyser, “Warren started to take it personally. It was all about him and his indecision.”

Beatty and Elaine May around the time of Heaven Can Wait. By Ron Galella/WireImage.

Ishtar was being distributed by an unfriendly studio that Beatty suspected was leaking damaging items to the press. According to one Columbia executive, quoted in Fast Fade, “Everybody worked for Puttnam, and Puttnam was against the picture, so every decision that came from the studio Warren saw Puttnam influencing or controlling. I think in some respects he was right” that the studio was undercutting the film. Puttnam’s attitude was probably captured best by an anonymous Columbia marketing executive who at the time wondered, rhetorically, “Could David have gotten involved and tried to make peace with the two of them? I guess he could have tried, but honestly I don’t think he gives a shit. It’s possible to live a fairly complete life without Warren or Dustin.”

The good news was that Ishtar had three successful previews. Beatty said of one in Toronto, “I have never had a more successful preview,” so much so that the studio and the principals discussed striking more prints and taking more theaters.

But on Friday, May 22, 1987, it all came crashing down. Ishtar was released on 1,139 screens. It was No. 1 that weekend, grossing $4.3 million, a decent number in those days, but was almost edged out by a horror movie called The Gate, which had no stars, a $4 million budget, and a gross of $4.2 million on the same number of screens.

Ishtar got mixed reviews. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, was most generous to the picture as a whole: “It’s a likable, good-humored hybrid, a mixture of small, funny moments and the pointless, oversized spectacle that these days is sine qua non for any hot-weather hit … ” Considerably less enamored, David Denby in New York magazine called it a “vanity production … a gigantic party joke,” and tossed in a few more choice words such as “crazy,” “greed,” “folly,” and “obsession.”

Sylbert’s acerbic critique of the movie is unforgiving but essentially on target: “When you make a movie like Ishtar, the audiences’ expectations can be exceeded, but they can’t be disappointed. This one disappoints all around. Elaine flattened everybody out. I cannot imagine that anybody who worked on that movie left it feeling that they did their best work. I didn’t.”

To a large degree, Beatty had fallen victim to his previous successes. “The great producer—how did this happen to him?” Sylbert continues. “He got so good at keeping the studio away, and getting his way with things, and taking the time he wanted to take, I don’t think he ever got a chance to examine what we were making.”

For his part, Beatty probably regarded the entire episode as an example of no good deed going unpunished. To this day he continues to defend the picture, although he allows, “We probably shouldn’t have gone to Morocco.” Even Hoffman, who hadn’t much liked the script in the first place, sticks up for the final product, albeit without enthusiasm. He says, “Ishtar was a B-minus, C-plus comedy.” But, he adds, “given its flaws, there was something aside from Warren’s seductive powers that made me do it. There’s a spine to it: isn’t it better to spend a lifetime being second-rate at what you’re passionate about, what you love, than be first-rate without a soul? That’s magnificent, and that’s what Elaine was after. I’d do it again. I just wish it had been worked out better.”

When the film’s run ended, Ishtar had grossed only $12.7 million. (The year’s biggest comedy, Three Men and a Baby, took in $168 million.) The New York Times put *Ishtar’*s final cost at $51 million, including overhead and financing charges, but excluding prints and ads; as with Reds, however, the real cost may never be known. According to Mac Brown, the unit production manager, “We were wildly high on a budget, but it wasn’t that we went over—it was that there was no budget, at least none that we submitted, where we said, ‘This is what it’s going to cost,’ and signed off on it. But they went ahead and started the movie anyway. I think we ended up around $50 or $51 million. It shouldn’t have cost what it cost.” (The average production budget in 1987 was $17 million.)

Hoffman and Beatty promoting the film in New York, 1987. Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier.

The fallout from Ishtar was substantial, another setback in what was shaping up as a very bad year for Beatty. In January, his father had died, and in early May his good friend Gary Hart had precipitously withdrawn from the race for the presidency. The polls indicated that had Hart not been laid low by a sex scandal he would have won the Democratic nomination and maybe the presidency, which would have made Beatty a behind-the-scenes player on the national stage, with almost as much power as he would have wielded had he run for office himself, a dream he would nurture but never fulfill.

Beatty’s relationship with May was altered forever. “Elaine was blaming him,” Hyser recalls. May felt that Beatty didn’t do enough press, and that the press that he did do was compromised by his excessive attempts to control it, which just antagonized reporters. Nor, according to a source, did she appreciate what she considered Beatty’s backhanded compliments in the press, such as “Who can control Elaine? She’s such a genius.” For a year or two after Ishtar came out, Beatty and May barely spoke. Although they warmed up some after that, the whole experience left a sour taste. According to writer Buck Henry, a friend of both, “Whenever I see Elaine, she has a wisecrack about Warren. The sense of it is ‘Are we having a good time in life, or are we working with Warren?’”

There were repercussions for the studio too, direct and indirect. Vincent and Puttnam were both gone within five months, and just as Transamerica sold United Artists, in 1981, after Heaven’s Gate, Coca-Cola eventually sold Columbia, to Sony, in 1989. Said Lisbeth Barron, an analyst at the Wall Street firm Balis Zorn Gerard Inc., “With the negative publicity surrounding Ishtar, Coke management said, ‘What are we doing in this business?’” It was a resonant question. As Paul Williams had said of “this business” just before *Ishtar’*s release, “You must remember one thing about Hollywood. Even if Ishtar is a big bomb, Warren, Dustin, Elaine, and I will all work again … only next time at a higher fee!”